EU Funding

EU Funding Applications and Grant Writing

Euro Freelancers specializes in helping companies, NGOs and research groups successfully apply for EU funding. Our team of freelance grant writers and consultants works closely with your organization to identify EU funding opportunities, develop a project, find partners and write a winning application.

Raising EU funding is an extremely competitive process. While an outstanding project is an absolute must, the skills to sell your idea to the funders and knowledge of the EU policy context are equally important.

We offer high-quality, customised project application and implementation services to help clients seize new EU funding opportunities and turn innovative ideas into funded projects. This ranges from EU public grants and private investments identification, consortium recruitment, bid writing, selection of experts, negotiation with the granting authorities, budgeting, quality control and implementation of projects.

Contact us via e-mail with a short description of your organisation, consortium, project and preferred EU funding programme. Euro Freelancers will match you with the most appropriate expert from our network, who will contact you with further questions to assess your EU funding eligibility.

Freelance Grant Writers

Euro Freelancers is a network of independent professionals with experience in business development, public policy, research, grant writing and project management. These skills are essential for preparing EU funding applications.

Our freelance EU funding experts are based in Brussels, Berlin, Helsinki and London, and can work with clients anywhere in Europe. Many of our consultants have worked as evaluators for EU programs, giving them insight into the process and knowledge of what is required to pass the scoring threshold and secure funding.

We have a sound track record of more than 20 years in submitting EU funding applications on behalf of large and small-to-medium-size companies, research centres, NGOs and local authorities with project budgets ranging from thousands to several million euros. Our linguistic, geographic and cultural proximity to the EU decision makers can help you to navigate the EU funding sector.

Trainings and workshops designed to develop skills in turning your EU funding application into a successful one.

EU Funding Programs

Our freelance EU grant writers have experience across a range of EU funding programs. The most frequently requested programs include:

Horizon 2020

Startups and established companies with breakthrough ideas can benefit from Horizon 2020, the EU’s biggest research and innovation program. In particular, the SME Instrument provides two grants to help companies grow. In Phase 1, SMEs receive a €50,000 grant to undertake a six-month feasibility study into their product, market, customers, competitors and finances. In Phase 2, companies can apply for between €500,000 and €2.5 million to expand their business across Europe and globally.

Euro Freelancers has deep experience in the SME Instrument, and a success rate of close to 65%. Our successful clients, whom we helped win EU funding, include Olfactomics Ltd (SME Instrument Phase 1) in the healthcare sector and Fuelsave GmbH (SME Instrument Phase 2) in the energy sector.

Creative Europe

Companies, NGOs and consortia working in the media, arts and cultural sector can obtain funding for their projects. Euro Freelancers has helped several high profile organizations receive grants of several million euro from Creative Europe.

Our successful clients include MediaRoad, a project led by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to strengthen public and private sector media organizations through policy development, networking and launching a series of incubators.

Our team spent several months consulting the EBU and its partners, including on-site workshops and regular web conferences. Our services included writing the extensive application document, structuring the budget, coordinating with all partners and reviewing the grant agreement.

Eurostars

Eurostars is ideal for R&D-driven companies seeking to commercialize their innovations together with a consortium of other companies across multiple countries, including several non-EU countries. The average project budget is €1.4 million, but consortia can apply for more or less funding. Projects should bring a verified innovation to market within two years.

Our successful clients include Labmaster which received a €1.7 million funding boost from Eurostars to complete development of Lucia, a revolutionary new point-of-care blood device to boost diagnostic speed and precision.

This program is less well known than others and has a higher success rate. Euro Freelancers has helped several consortia receive Eurostars funding.

Erasmus+

Erasmus+ is the EU funding program to support education, training, youth and sport in Europe. It’s typically suited for universities and learning institutions for networking activities and exchanging of best practices. This includes improvement of the professional skills of their staff, organisational capacity building, and creating transnational cooperative partnerships.

Euro Freelancers has been working with educational institutions across Europe to develop successful funding applications under Erasmus+.

Further EU Funding Programs

While the above programs are the most requested, Euro Freelancers has experience with many other EU funding programs, including:

​We also have expertise with WORLD BANK, IFC, UNDP and EBRD tendering process. We currently monitor a total of more than 50 European funding programs and sub-programs.

Detailed EU Funding Services

EU Public Grants and Tender Monitoring​

The EU selection of funded projects is very administrative and the requirements grow increasingly year after year. Our EU funding consultants are specialised in specific calls for proposals with a proven track records in drafting, managing and assessing EU funded projects. We can guide you through the entire project funding life cycle with customised advice and operational support to ultimately help you in being selected.

We constantly monitor EU funding opportunities and advise on how to draft applications and create partnerships. We regularly update a monthly directory of EU funding opportunities, which contains a snapshot of the main public grants and private investments and send periodic detailed alerts to organisations, which are keen to find partners for joint project applications. We use a special software to screen all EU funding opportunities and pieces of legislation relevant to your specific activities and systematically track any developments in funding regimes and rules. Via a dedicated portal, our clients can monitor and evaluate their application process and receive tailor-made alerts.​

We systematically and carefully review draft proposals from an evaluator’s perspective, in line with the official award and selection criteria. Our final goal is to provide you, prior the submission, with clear and constructive expert opinions on the key impact and scientific-excellence criteria for selection.

We can also arrange meetings in Brussels with appropriate European Commission or Executive Agencies officials to put your case forward for grant funding. If you are planning to submit a grant proposal, you will be competing with others that have been professionally prepared, so make sure yours is too.

Finally, we can connect project developers with potential investors either at the exploitation phase of a running project or prior the proposal submission, securing external co-financing​.

EU Funding Report

We can perform a comprehensive feasibility study to define to which extent your project ideas are in line with the current EU grant programs and regulations. Based on this feasibility study, we can prepare a customised EU Funding Report that represents a strategic roadmap on EU funding applications for your organisation. This report analyses and puts into context for specific EU funding applications the following details:

As a result of this analysis, we offer strategic guidance on EU funding applications in the short and medium term for your organisation. This includes the following details:

Which of your existing projects or ideas are eligible for EU funding;

Which calls for proposals or tenders you could apply for and how much you could obtain;

Which partnership and co-financing amount is to be expected;

What feedback the European Commission may give you at a pre-evaluation stage;

What timescale, activities workplan and staff costs may be involved.

This EU Funding Report aims to ultimately provide you with an opportunity to improve awareness on the identification and access to available EU funding opportunities, which will be supported by guidance and advice on how to complete and submit EU funding applications. The likely outputs from this process will be an increased:

Understanding and confidence in engaging with EU funding processes;

Expertise and equipped skills to compete for EU funding;

Participation in EU funding applications;

EU funding success rates.

Exploitation and Dissemination of Project Results

The different EU grant authorities often stress that project partners must produce detailed exploitation and dissemination plans to make sure the practical use of the knowledge generated in the project and its industrial implementation. However, project partners often struggle to design significant exploitation plans, as this involves technical expertise going beyond their mandate and their scientific skills.

Our EU funding consultants have worked closely with project developers to address the technical barriers for transforming scientific outputs into viable innovations and support them to successfully penetrate the market. This includes industrial production, demonstrations and commercialisation of the results generated in the project implementation.

Our EU funding consultants have developed and tested an innovative and structured methodology for broader commercial exploitation of project results resulting in licensing deals and spin-off creation all over Europe. We can therefore act in support or as work package leaders in charge of commercialisation of those project deliverables which have an impact on the market and can be exploitable.

Monitoring and Evaluation of Project Results

Evaluation activities can help EU funded projects to be more strategic about the targeted stakeholders, the overall objectives of the different EU programs and the impacts expected on the ground. These activities are designed to make the project implementation more effective in terms of the impacts generated so that partners are better equipped to embark into the next tasks of a project work plan.

The key aim of evaluation activities is to design and articulate the work plan of the project in manners that can be tested at regular intervals. The evaluation process should indicate cases of positive performance as well as areas for improvement. The process may also identify unforeseen risks and events which could affect the critical path of the project implementation. This allows the project to adjust and enhance the direction of its work plan, to maximise the quality of its deliverables and increase the potential for long-term impact.

Our EU funding consultants have developed and tested an innovative and structured methodology for monitoring and evaluating the progress of each project deliverable and the overall project performance, measuring its success against key performance indicators. We can act in support to workpackage leaders in the design and implementation of a comprehensive evaluation plan and an evaluation report at the end of the project.

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